Series Site
"As the second installation of our occasional series DECADES OF DEBRIS (formerly known as BENJI’S WORLD), Spectacle is thrilled to collaborate with our longtime partners at Screen Slate to host a month-long reprisal of June’s HOT BLOODED: AN ARIZAL MARATHON, the collection of fist-and-face-blending action works helmed by the still-mysterious mononymous Indonesian director known as ARIZAL.
"The original “HOT BLOODED: THE ARIZAL MARATHON” took place in August 2012, in conjunction with Spectacle’s first-and-last-ever SUMMER OF SHRAPNEL – an entire month of action cinema from around the world programmed in a doomed bid at offsetting the dog days of late summer. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the filmmaker’s untimely passing in May 2014, HOT BLOODED is back, with a few new VHS transfers.
"With over 50 features and eight television series (“sinetron”) to his credit between 1974 and 2006, Arizal is is rightly described by his English Wikipedia page as “one of Indonesian most productive film director and script writer;” and yet these six films dated between 1981 and 1989 are the only ones classified as “Action” films on the IMDb (which lists one under two different titles for an incorrect total of seven movies). If Arizal is an obscure figure outside North America, it’s not difficult to imagine why—each of these features individually puts the entire western action film canon to shame. Suppression is an obvious motive.
"Arizal is, if nothing else, the Monet of cars spewing fire from their trunks barrelling nose-first, upside-down into other exploding vehicles while Anglo heroes arc through the flames like star-spangled ropes of jism spewing bullets from a musclebike. The kind of artist who suicide-launches a flaming oil tanker into the helicopter of logic and reason, Arizal is on a sobering quest to unabashedly deliver every dashed promise all other action filmmakers have made. He is a steel-toothed, Rube Goldbergian idea factory of prurient bloodlust, pyromania and righteous acrobatic vengeance. If 10-year-old boys’ lewdest fantasies didn’t already exist, Arizal would have invented them.
"EACH OF THESE FILMS stars a uniquely charismatic Anglo leading male, none of whom anyone would have ever heard of if AMERICAN HUNTER’s Christopher Mitchum had not run unsuccessfully for California’s 24 congressional district house seat back in 2012. And yet with the exception of THE STABILIZER, and just months ago SPECIAL SILENCERS, none of these films are available for retail in North America, and scantly available via private file sharing networks; when we last hosted this retrospective they could only be seen through carefully circulated choice bootleg distribution of decades-old Dutch, Greek and Japanese VHS releases.
Thanks to Screen Slate, Spectacle has obtained the highest quality sources available, and we take great pride in having procured all works with their original English dubbing." -Jon Dieringer